Sarah Vine – Mail on Sunday Jan 10, 2021
Do you remember when all those old wartime slogans suddenly started appearing on tea towels and mugs?
‘Keep calm and carry on’, ‘Loose talk costs lives’ and – my own personal favourite – ‘To dress extravagantly in wartime is worse than bad form, it is unpatriotic’.
They seemed so quaint, a nostalgic reminder of long-vanished times. It amused us, in our clever, modern, cynical way, to think of people dutifully obeying their entreatments.
We would never be so gullible as to be taken in by such things – and besides, a world so paranoid and fearful, where government should seek to control such aspects of life as the clothes on our back and the words in our mouths, was inconceivable. Wasn’t it?
Cue hollow laughter. Such gentle wartime admonishments seem positively quaint compared with the relentless propaganda now raining down upon us.
And this time it’s not just a few words on the side of an omnibus, or a poster hastily pasted to an awning: it’s a full-on television and internet campaign.
It’s a non-stop assault on our senses, a constant, 24-hour cacophony of doom. Day and night, online and in print, on television and radio, the message is simple and inescapable: do as you’re told, or we’re all going to die.
The latest weapon of mass depression was deployed on Friday in the shape of Chris Whitty, recast as a modern-day Lord Kitchener, pointing the finger at anyone not yet cowering in terror behind the boxes of loo roll in the corner of a reinforced steel basement.
Slowly and solemnly, and with the air of a prison chaplain addressing a congregation of especially recalcitrant young offenders, he lectured us about the gravity of the situation, reminding us in no uncertain terms that the very fact of our existence remains the greatest of threats to the NHS.
By way of reinforcement, the Government released two terrifying new posters showing a dying patient – yes, actually dying – and a healthcare worker wearing full PPE, with the warning: ‘If you go out, you can spread it. People will die.’
Meanwhile, Sage proclaimed an urgent need for even tighter restrictions. Tighter how, exactly? What do they want us to do – actually stop breathing? Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad idea. After all, it’s becoming increasingly apparent we humans are the real problem here, not the virus itself.
Don’t get me wrong. I am no ‘covidiot’ (hated word), no denier of either the existence or the severity of this disease. I understand the problems the NHS faces, and the huge responsibility that rests on the shoulders of Ministers (possibly more than most, since I live under the same roof as one), as they battle to get this thing under control.
I sympathise with the impossible choices they are having to make, made all the more difficult by a Labour Party that has, at every turn, behaved with a level of venality shocking even by their current low standards.
I understand that the Government can’t do this without the collaboration of the general public, as I think do most sensible people.
And I accept the need for restrictions, even though I think a lot of them don’t always make sense and I fear for the long-term consequences of it all.
What I don’t get is the need to scare us witless. This Project Fear the Government seems to have embarked on as a way of ramping up the public’s response to the rising R-rate does not strike me as either wise or particularly effective. There is only so much bad news people can take before they become desensitised to it, and I fear a lot of people are at that stage.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the current level of fire-and-brimstone rhetoric doesn’t inadvertently result in people being less, not more, likely to fall in line. Things are not exactly helped by the over-the-top actions of certain police forces, which seem to have interpreted the current situation as an excuse to indulge in a spot of Stasi role-play.
Deploying seven officers to arrest two women on a walk in a park, for example. Or threatening to fine people for throwing snowballs. Or barging into people’s houses on the whim of a neighbour.
All these things make a population already on edge even edgier. Spreading panic and fear serves no useful purpose, and yet this is what the Government, the police and certain sectors of the media seem intent on doing.
It won’t have the desired effect. It will simply encourage the already hysterical, screeching harbingers of doom, the paranoid lockdown zealots, while alienating and very likely infuriating the vast majority of still (just about) sane people who are doing their best to keep their heads down and get through this nightmare in one piece.
If you fill people’s hearts with misery – and I’m sorry, Mr Whitty in full apocalyptic mode is the very essence of misery – they will lose all hope, and right now hope is the only thing getting most of us through our day.
Hope not just in the vaccine, but in the possibility of salvaging jobs and businesses, of making up for lost school time, of seeing loved ones, of being able to book a table at a restaurant without feeling like a criminal.
And besides, if I’m honest, I’m not sure how much more panicked I can be. I already wake up at 3am most mornings, my stomach liquid, Corona nightmares running through my head.
I already lie there, listening to the ringing in my ears and the foxes howling, worrying about my parents, my children, the economy, friends who have lost loved ones, colleagues who are struggling, the faces of weary doctors and nurses on the news, the closed signs in shop windows and so on, in an ever-decreasing spiral of despair.
I am sure I am not alone. There can’t be a single person in the country who doesn’t understand the severity of the situation. But just because things are serious does not mean we all have to be suicidal. Maintaining public morale at a time like this is vital – otherwise we are not going to have the mental strength to get through to the other side and begin the long, slow process of recovery.
Frightening the population into submission is not the way to get this country back on its feet again. It’s a way of sending everyone around the bend, of heightening existing divisions, of turning neighbour against neighbour, friend against friend.
And yet all we are getting from those who lead us is hysteria at a time when what we need is a cool, calm plan of action and a safe and steady hand.
What we must do is focus on better days to come, not lose ourselves ever deeper in the abyss.
We all know what needs to be done. Enough of the fear-mongering. Let’s just look to the future – and get on with it.
A fake pandemic to roll out mandatory mRNA/nanoHydrogel injections.
Sarah Vine, another Peter Hitchens flunkie who never steps over fake news red lines because she would never work again. Vine goes on about the “Cacophony of doom’ but only in respect of regime fear. Sheeple have died during 2020, some in March, others in December. They didn’t die from Covid and the last months were stolen from them. The fact is, we are all having time from our lives stolen by the regime & if you were to believe out tyrannical leaders, this could go on for years.
There is another article on here warning that Boris will tighten lockdown restrictions. He must say this because he has no way out. They’ve created their own trap because free thinking sheeple will just get on with their lives & the fake news reports this, so Boris must respond. This is why dictatorships always get worse as time goes on. Has Sir Kier Establishment Starmer demanded that the regime publish its secret Covid data? Of course not.
I don’t listen to the fake news and I find it harder to bother with this site when it rolls out Daily Fail fake news stories, & I realise that is my problem, but I also see the disinterest in other commentators’ comments, when we are talking about the usual bollox article after article. There is very little analysis, all the writers do is respond to wilder & wackier fake news stories. And I will make the point that it’s not all the editor’s fault, He can only work with what is out there. It’s not as if this site can pay for presstitutes like Vine & Hitchens.
Still msm missing the point completely.
Well of course we are all in this together aren’t we Sarah? Even if we are a national newspaper columnist married to a Government Minister.
I’m sure it’s just as bad for you and your husband as it is for the poorest, loneliest and most despairing members of the public who have no job to go back to, or have watched the business they’ve spent their lives building up crumble and disappear.
Nothing really ringing in my head only three words: empty hospitals everywhere!!! Thank you!
I don’t know if anyone has thought this, but the likes of Whitty and Ferguson or even BoJo are pretty ugly emasculated excuses for men . Perhaps the only way they can get their leg over is to get paid tons of money for worshipping the dark side ?
It’s meant to drive us crazy!
@Peter Appleby
“Whom the gods would destroy…”
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
— Joseph Goebbels
Lewis Jones: elaborate with graphs, charts & data sets… only kidding, but please explain.
Sarah Vine is married to Michael Gove. That essay of hers is laughable to say the least. She is married to the man who helps bring in these draconian rules. Its like pissing in the wind reading that. She must think our heads are buttoned up the back. Jog on Mrs Gove
If you didn’t know, the slogan the Jewish Overlords are using for this Covid-19 hoax: ‘We’re all in this together’; was borrowed from the 2015 TV mini-series ‘Childhoods End’, based on the novel by Arthur C. Clarke. And if you’ve read the book or saw the Mini-Series, you remember what kind of future the Overlords had arranged for humanity.
But hey, you fought for these Jewish Overlords in WWII, & now the ‘Golden Age’ is ending….Figure it out, if you can.
I actually think this is a beautifully written article. My favourite Essayist – and Writer – George Orwell would be proud if it.
I am, online, generally either empathised with by similar ‘Truthers’ or dismissed as a ‘Far Right’ ‘Flat Earther'(the very last comment addressed to me), but as a Domestic Assistant at a Care Home currently suffering from a CV19-Positive Reading Attack, I can offer some observations.
Very, very sadly,one of our most beloved residents, in two high risk groups, did contract this and passed on in hospital.
The rest have suffered from symptoms varying from nothing to very unpleasant, but not Hospital-inducing.
The virus is real, but the Statist Manipulation accruing from it is, of course, precisely what it appears to be and is wildly disproportionate.
Therefore, this article struck me even as I was reading it as achieving a near perfect balance.
Aside from that, it simply has the Orwellian quality of good Plain Prose – a wide vocabulary and frame of reference without being either too elaborate or too ‘earthy’.
When the criminally insane government demands vaccinations and you submit out of fear or obedience, do not forget that in this universe natural selection is a law that will weed out the weak. In this case, those who are not aware or lack the will to resist will be the first to be weeded out of the genepool.
You can already tell you these people are, those wearing the masks voluntarily.
Guy Reid-Brown: go away troll.
When society has gone completely insane, it may be time to retreat to nature. Those in the cities may be trapped like rats, caught in a Jewish media matrix of deceit and destruction.
The insanity of Jews is now reaching fever pitch, and looking at their past behavior, like what Jews did in the Bolshevik revolution, it may be high time to flee the evil matrix of control and live in a primitive setting free of television and radio.
Those who mocked preppers were damn fools.
Carl Jones – don’t be a w*****r all your life.
I am the only person in the world with this name, and it is the name on my passport –
Look me up online –
My top song on You Tube is a tribute to the Yellow Jackets- ‘ WWG1 WGA’.
I am surprised I haven’t been deplatformed.
https://youtu.be/1uXfmvKZ33s
A Troll, seeing as you are plainly too stupid to breathe and need explaining to, is anonymous by definition.
As the moderator allowed Jones’ nasty ad hominem attack through, I would be grateful if they had the graciousness to post this rebuttal – it is bloody important to stand up and be counted, why I ALWAYS use my full name – AND I provided my own asterisks 🙂
I am, actually, risking my life in more ways than one -I am even having the vaccination at that, which the Truthseeker suggests will kill me – so please post this.
It is my Last Wish (grin)
Who is that demonically decrepit ghoul in the photo? He rather resembles Golem/Smeegal from Lord of the Rings, but uglier and completely lacking a soul. It looks like he is propped up behind that garish podium of lies, so I suppose he must be just another shameless liar and compromised miscreant.